Friday, May 30, 2014

Wendy Ham - New Yorker Finds Regular Tennis With League

Wendy has been a member of the TennisNewYork.com Women’s league and Tennis Ladder since the summer of 2013. She's a passionate tennis player who tries to
play three to five times a week and will tell you that she is at the 3.0 level. In 2014, Wendy set herself a goal to make the Tennis New York
playoffs at least once, and she is very happy to have accomplished this goal in
the Spring Season. Another goal of hers this year is to be more aggressive in
matches and score more net points.

All tennis
players start somewhere. For Wendy it all started in high school. However, she
struggled to practice regularly because it was always hard for her to find
regular partners, not to mention available tennis courts. Needless to say, she felt
very thankful when she discovered TennisNewYork.com. The network has made it
very easy for her to meet many enthusiastic partners of all levels who are as motivated
as she is to play regularly. Wendy loves
her tennis and will tell you that while it looks easy, tennis is actually very difficult
to master. Nonetheless, the room for perpetual improvement is exactly the allure of the game for Wendy. She
finds tennis both exhilarating and relaxing, and she finds the mental aspects
of the game particularly engaging. Wendy is currently trying hard to finish her
PhD dissertation (on the use of computational models to study the accuracy of forecasting
strategies), and tennis has provided her with just the right kind of healthy
distraction. Tennis
matches can be memorable for many reasons. For Wendy, matches in which both
sides play well and unforced errors are kept to a minimum are the ones she
recalls with fondness. Those and several matches she played in 30-degree
weather (outdoors!) last winter with Bill Inman, another player on the Tennis Ladder. Any player
serious about improving their game will have league rivalries, and Wendy is no
different. She has no fear of playing opponents of a higher level. In fact, she has lost to Masahiro Maeda 17 times in a row, and that’s just the official
records. This rivalry might skew Wendy’s official match statistics but she
won’t give up trying to beat him. (She thinks she’s getting close, especially
after reading Brad Gilbert’s Winning Ugly.) Any tennis player will tell you the
only way to improve your own game is to play those better than yourself.
Playing Masahiro reveals areas of Wendy’s game she can improve upon, and she is
grateful that he is still willing to play her. (Must be something to do with his win
record increasing with each meeting – come on Wendy!)Meeting other
tennis lovers is always a key attraction for tennis players, and Wendy is no
different. She enjoys meeting the diverse range of people the league attracts, which
so far has included a number of finance professionals (not unusual in NYC), but
also an opera singer and a fashion model! She especially enjoys the fact that many
of the league players seem to be as obsessed with tennis as she is.